‘World’s first sperm race’ in sticky situation after ‘faking live event’

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People watch a visualization of the sperm race between Noah Boat and YouTuber Jimmy Zhang during the undercard Sperm Racing competition in Los Angeles, California on April 25, 2025. Tristan Mykel of USC holds a golden sperm trophy after winning the Sperm Racing competition championship in Los Angeles, California on April 25, 2025. At the Los Angeles event on Friday night, a man in a lab coat used pipettes to place samples of semen -- collected from contestants ahead of time -- onto tiny two-millimeter-long "tracks." The race track is magnified 100 times by a microscope, then filmed by a camera that 17-year-old high schooler Eric Zhu says transfers the image to a 3D animation software before the final video is broadcast to the audience. The unusual sport was invented by Zhu, who raised over a million dollars to organize the event to raise awareness of male infertility. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP) (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)
People watch a visualization of the sperm race in Los Angeles last week (Picture: AFP)

It’s the one thing everyone on planet Earth’s done once and only once: win a sperm race.

So when two students set out to repeat the achievement in a ‘live’ race last week, it turned out to be a blockbuster event, attracting huge numbers of spectators and cash bets of up to thousands of dollars each.

But doubts have since been cast as to whether the contest was all it was made out to be.

The contest, held at the Los Angeles Center Studios on Friday, was billed as a dash between two sperm along a ‘microscopic racetrack’ ending at a finish line.

But a renowned fertility doctor has since said that videos purporting to show this ‘sperm racing’ could not be footage of real human swimmers.

‘I look at sperm all day under the microscope and these are not human sperm,’ said Dr Steven Palter, medical director of Gold Coast IVF in New York.

Sperm race
USC student Tristan Milker, 20, beat 19-year-old UCLA student Asher Proeger
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‘This is CGI, this is computer-generated,’ he added, citing differences in the proportions, their swimming technique, and the fact they moved determinedly in one direction.

He showed real footage of sperm in his lab in which very different-looking cells wiggled about in seemingly random directions.

‘What’s the real story guys, why are you doing this, why are you putting out fake videos?’, Dr Palter asked.

Dr Palter has said that the organisers could have tracked the speed of real sperm and used CGI to transpose it onto a ‘racetrack’.

A video journalist who attended the event for The Free Press has said he was told as much by PR representatives from organisers Sperm Racing.

A document sent to Austyn Jeffs reportedly stated: ‘For added entertainment value, the live positions of the sperm are mapped onto a dynamic 3D model of the track, creating an engaging visual experience.’

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However questions have been raised as to whether the ‘live positions’ were indeed used, given sperm tend to dart around randomly, or rather simply their speed.

Dr Palter compared it to having blindfolded men trying to run on a track, followed by a group of professional athletes racing along another track basing their movement on the speed of the blindfolded men.

‘I would have no problem if they had just said this is an interpretation,’ he told The Free Press.

‘But in reality, watching real sperm would be kind of boring. But they are encouraging people to bet on it.’

Mr Jeffs also reported seeing prerecorded clips of the race being uploadedinto the ‘live’ video stream backstage, labelled with the name of the winner of each round.

He said he confronted 17-year-old Sperm Racing co-founder Eric Zhu, and that Mr Zhu responded: ‘So basically, what happens is you have to collect [sperm] samples before. . . so they actually did this an hour before.’

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Mr Zhu insisted the sperm had still run a real race, even if it took place earlier in private.

He told The Free Press the sperm’s movement is indeed traced and rendered ‘in real time’, so what the spectators saw was a real race.

Posting on X after the event, the founders said: ‘Live clip comparisons between 3D and raw footage, along with an in-depth bio doc, will be published this weekend to show results and verifications of the races.’

Doubt has also been cast as to whether the race can indeed be called a ‘world-first’.

A BBC Two programme, Lab Rats, hosted a similar contest in a pub in 2004 – showing real zoomed-in microscoping footage in which sperm cells darted around erratically.

Another was produced as part of the BBC’s The Truth About Food in 2007.

Mr Zhu reportedly acknowledged hearing about them days before the event but did not change his marketing.

He has been approached for comment.

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